


Ember

by RurouniHime



Series: Spark [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Tony, Infinity Gauntlet, M/M, Pining, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Battle, Protective Steve Rogers, Recovery, Shock, Steve Rogers Feels, Wakanda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:37:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: “I was sure you were dead,” he says. “When you went after that ship, something...”Utterly, completely, wholly.“I just knew.”





	Ember

**Author's Note:**

> So I have now tagged for pairing! Because it might trigger some people, I'm putting a small extra spoiler in the end notes.

It takes almost two hours to get Tony alone.

There are doctors who want to look at his wound, and having seen it for himself, Steve ends up pushing for this harder than he thought himself capable. It’s a brief second wind, but it whumps straight into his sternum like a kick to the chest. Then Rhodey, against whom Tony just slumps, and stays, for so long Steve thinks he has passed out, until he finally reaches up and crushes Rhodey into a full embrace. After Rhodey comes Shuri, blinking haunted eyes, peeling apart the damage to Tony’s suit with his fatigued input. They are two flat beings, tinkering in the void toward a light Steve’s not sure either of them can see. Through it all, the woman Tony arrived with sticks to his side like glue, glaring around at everyone with hostile eyes—until Rocket comes out of his stupor. 

He’s faster than expected, for having just learned that every single one of his shipmates is gone. But Steve doesn’t believe for a second that he’s ready. Just repressing. Barely reined in, and getting jumpier. Steve is well acquainted with that hell; he’s been living it for two days straight, but now everything, _everything_ is raging on a one-way geyser to the surface.

There’s Bruce as well, Rhodey and Natasha, Thor, and Steve’s trying to remember that Tony is not just his, that the others grieved over him, too, feared for him, prayed for him. That they love him.

But it’s so hard.

God in Heaven, wrath has a relentless flavor. Steve has no shield for the understanding he now possesses. He stands in the darkness while Shuri helps Tony fix his nanotech, and just _stares_ at it: mere moments before Thanos pounded Steve into the dirt, he was halfway across the universe stabbing Tony’s own blade through his side with that very same hand. The ghost at the base of Steve’s brain roils again, gaining more of a foothold than before. But he’s still too numb. There’s nothing for it to cling to, and it slips back.

Ice. Always ice, with him.

Finally the doctors go, Shuri goes, Nebula goes. Bruce stumbles away to sleep somewhere, Rhodey out into the city to help Okoye, and the others… Steve’s not sure. He sits with Tony on a lonely cot in the corner of a hospital whose emptiness should be welcome, but the very air is wrong, it should never, ever be empty like _this…_ and he drinks his fill.

He’s always had trouble not reaching out. Clapping Tony on the shoulder, touching his bespoke suits, or messing with his hair. Propriety—uncertainty—kept him in check for the duration of their friendship.

Now that wall is dust at his feet, and he reaches.

His fingers skim Tony’s bangs, light as the breeze gliding through the open window; Tony might not even notice. But he does; he freezes, looks up at Steve, and where Steve might have stopped before, now he just goes on, fingering dirt and grime and underneath, silk. His hand tilts, runs the edge of Tony’s hairline down his temple and falls to his sideburn. Where that ends, he skips to the soft hinge of Tony’s jaw, trailing over the too-long prickle of his beard.

Always so meticulous, so perfectly shaped. Not now.

“Steve?”

He can count on one hand the times he has heard Tony Stark sound uncertain. ‘Uncertain’ doesn’t even chip at the surface today. “I was sure you were dead,” he says. “When you went after that ship, something...” _Utterly, completely, wholly._ “I just knew.”

Tony doesn’t say anything.

_I knew, and though I brought them all home, home wasn’t home anymore, home was nothing but a beautiful building, and you weren’t ever coming back._

“And then I _had_ to come home.” His voice cracks. “One of us... had to come home again.”

“I didn’t know how to call you.” Tony’s eyes are on Steve’s hand where it now rests in his lap. It’s a stretch before he speaks again. “How to apologize—”

“Don’t.” Steve squeezes his eyes shut, feeling like he’s lived about four lifetimes. “It’s not important.”

“We lost everybody.” As though he can’t quite believe it; he’s staring at his hands now, seeing something else there that Steve can’t see, and suddenly Steve is terrified to ask how he lost them all. How... how the kid went.

“Bucky went right before my eyes,” Steve mutters. He sees it every time he closes them. He can’t un-see it. Maybe it’s not the time for this, but it feels necessary: “He was sorry, too.”

“I know,” Tony answers quickly. He runs both hands over his face and lets out a painful-sounding sigh. “I know.”

None of it feels real. Steve can’t imagine ever putting so much weight on so small a thing as the Accords, an insignificant, manmade quarrel, a bundle of _paper._ He knows it was important, damn well crucial, to Wanda, to Clint, to him. To the soul of humanity. But Wanda’s dead. The kid from Queens is dead. The squabble for human superiority seems so stupid now.

Tony Stark, Earth’s best defender, is two feet from him. Steve fingers his hair again.

They haven’t even received the numbers—the names—from back home. The loss of so many at once has screwed the world’s infrastructure to high heaven, and there’s no one to count heads when there are fires and riots and mass panic to put down. Something in Steve, something from before Thanos, is shouting in the void, trying to be heard: _Don’t do this. Don’t touch, don’t think this way, you can’t, it’s not right. He has someone, it’s not you. Stop._ He feels like he’s on one side of about three layers of gauze, pressing full palmed against the barrier, squinting at the shapes on the other side. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s still turning around expecting Buck or Sam or Wanda to be standing there, and maybe it’s because last night he started the slide down that slope where at the bottom he’ll realize he has the blood of _half the fucking world_ on his hands, but he, Steve Rogers, is no longer capable of this kind of morality.

All he knows is that Tony is alive. Tony’s blood is not on his hands, Tony survived, Tony is here, breathing and hurting and suffering, Tony, whose opinion he cares so much about that he went to war, exiled himself, broke his friend, broke his own _heart..._

Tony is alive.

Steve waited for that call for two years. Kept the phone close at all hours, startled awake at night certain that it had only just rung, grabbed it up with phantom chimes jangling in his ears. When it had at last come, he was slow to answer—stared at it in disbelief for a good three seconds, then snatched it up. Demanded, _Tony?_

(Not wise. Not _wise._ What if Tony no longer had control over the phone?)

But it wasn’t Tony at all. It was Bruce.

He shakes himself out of the trough. He’s fallen into it before—hung up that phone, turned on the news, and understood that he was already too late and Tony was gone, maybe even—

He shakes free again and looks at the man himself instead. He’s beautiful. He’s filthy and fragmented and lost, and he’s beautiful.

So Steve can’t think about morality. About respect for a relationship that already exists. One day, it will bite him, what he’s doing here. One day, if there’s any sort of normality in his future, he’ll look back and feel the worst loathing for his weakness. Right now, there are too many holes in the world, and all he can think is that Tony is still breathing the same air as he is, not angry anymore, looking at Steve like Steve is his lodestone, and pulling Steve in so quickly he has already given up the fight.

Right now, he’s so deep in Tony Stark he can’t possibly claw his way out.

“I saw all of you die,” Tony whispers. His eyes are liquid, fixed on Steve’s. His head has tilted into Steve’s palm, heat beating from his scalp. He needs sleep, probably has a fever, could still die from what Thanos wrought. But Steve can’t move, can only listen. “Before Ultron. Wanda… showed it to me.”

He’d always wondered what the others had seen. Been too angry to ask, or too mindful to pry. He should have pried. Maybe if he had, they wouldn’t have ended up like this, they would have understood each other, they would never have—

Tony takes a slow breath, lets it out just as slowly. “But it wasn’t like this. God.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, so hard that Steve sees tears well in his eyelashes. “This is so much worse.”

 _We lost._ It thuds steadily in Steve’s ears. _We lost. We lost._ He’s never lost before. Acute losses, yes, dreadful and personal wounds: battles, people…his own life. Even against Tony and all the little losses there, he’d won something, though that victory was bitter as hell. But the larger, primal fight, against true evil? That he had always won.

This was being pounded bloody into the ground, left broken-boned and staring teary-eyed at the inferno as it ate everything. 

“I can’t believe this happened,” he croaks, and Tony lurches in with a grunt, flings an arm around him, and pulls them into a pile of limbs and heat, biting out the pain of his wound into Steve’s hair. Steve wraps his arms around him, buries his face in Tony’s oil-acrid shoulder, and holds himself absolutely rigid because if he doesn’t, he’ll shatter, and he can’t do that.

He’ll shatter. 

But then Tony mutters a word against his scalp

_—Steve—_

and he does anyway.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> I just saw Infinity War again today. Oh my god.
> 
>  **Extra warning:** Steve displays a willful dismissal of Tony and Pepper's relationship in this story. He's in shock, he's still picking up the pieces, and there's nothing overt. But he's pretty frank about what he feels.


End file.
